Wiesenthal Center fights hate
If we’ve learned anything over this last fraught decade or so, it’s that it’s always wise to bet on hate. (Being wise doesn’t mean being moral, of course, but we most certainly are not talking about morality when we talk about hate.)
Hate can be aimed at almost anyone, but it seems to be particularly targeted at Jews.
As the retired head of the ADL, Abraham Foxman of Bergen County, says, there’s always hate around somewhere, even in the United States. After World War II, it largely was shoved underground, where it festered, but it wasn’t until the last 10 years that it started sliming up, pushing aside the sewer covers that had kept it down. Much of it was coming from the right.
Although common sense and common decency both dictate that horror and outrage at the pogroms of October 7 should have driven away antisemitic hatred, it did not. So now, hate from the left is joining hate from the right, in a demented horseshoe.
The Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center has been studying the Holocaust since 1997. But since 1993, through its Museum of Tolerance, it’s been developing educational weapons in the fight against antisemitism, and against hate in general. Now, that fight is on wheels. One of the center’s Mobile Museums of Tolerance visits educational institutions in the states that fund them.
“The museum in L.A. is 100,000 square feet,” the Wiesenthal Center’s northeast regional director, Michael Cohen of Englewood, said. “It’s called a museum, but really it’s more a training center, teaching cultural sensitivity, tolerance, and diversity. It’s taught almost 9 million students since it opened, including 180,000 who are frontline law enforcement. It’s also taught many, many teachers and educators.” And of course many children and teenagers have gone through its training programs.
The programs at the museum are interactive, sophisticated, and state of the art, Mr. Cohen said.
“But we recognized years ago that as amazing and effective as our programs are, you can’t get kids from all across the country to L.A. People from across the country don’t have the kind of access that people who live nearby have.
“So how do you make sure that our next generation can learn the lessons we teach if they can’t get to that specific brick-and-mortar place?”
There’s always online training, but as much as a lifeline between teachers and students the internet can provide, still, some lessons are far more effective when they are taught in person, not mediated by a screen.
What to do?
Get on a bus!
“In 2012, we started the mobile museum,” Mr. Cohen said. “It’s a multimedia interactive digital environment that replicates the museum, to the best of our ability. It can go from school to school, community to community, so you can reach places in the suburbs or in rural areas that otherwise wouldn’t have access to this material.
“The government of Canada funded that first one. It started in Toronto. And then, in 2018, we were able to get the state of Illinois to fund one. And we also got funding in New York State for two buses. One is for the five boroughs, and downstate; the other is for upstate.
“It takes about a year from when we get the funding to when it’s actually on the road.”
The vehicle Mr. Cohen calls a bus is big and articulated, and when it’s parked it can be unfolded to become even bigger. It’s much smaller than the museum, of course, but it can hold an entire class of kids as well as all the screens and other pedagogic equipment that surrounds them.
The buses go to public schools, Mr. Cohen said; “we have a team that works with school district superintendents and principals, and with state legislators. They tell us what their needs are, where the hot spots are, and we arrange with the schools to go to their sites.
“Lessons about cultural diversity and combating hate are right for every school, but if you find that a school or a school district has had an antisemitic incident, or an incident involving hate, you want to rush there to deal with it immediately.”
The buses are equipped with five modules, concentrating on civil rights, the Anne Frank story, the power of ordinary people, combating hate, and discerning fact from fiction. The last two are part of the Wiesenthal Center’s digital media literacy workshop — a concept that will become more and more important very quickly.
“That workshop teaches how to recognize hate online and in social media, and how to understand it,” Mr. Cohen said. “You hear about many crises, and you ask the younger generation how they get their information, and they say on TikTok or some other social media platform. Our workshop teaches ways to determine what is fact and what is fiction and how to differentiate real news from fake news.”
The menu also lists the grades for which each module is best suited.
There are subject-area experts working on all this material, deciding which part of it is best suited for whom; they take all sorts of factors into consideration as they decide.
The Anne Frank module, for example, which is listed as most appropriate for fifth through eighth graders, “shows what her life was really like in the annex,” Mr. Cohen said. Because the students are about the same age as Anne was, “they can identify with her.”
Each module is the length of one class session. A bus will stay at the school for as long as necessary to allow every student to go to a program there. Normally, Mr. Cohen said, that takes anywhere from three days to a week.
As for parking it — that’s not much of a problem in the country, or even in the suburbs. In the city, well, there are a lot of logistics involved, but with a properly obtained parking permit, miracles are possible.
So far, Mr. Cohen said, two new buses are being prepared for Florida and another is going to northern California. (Because the state is so big, the museum in L.A., in the south, is too far away for Californians living close to the border with Oregon.) The Wiesenthal Center also has secured funding for buses in Massachusetts and Hawaii.
But there’s a big omission on that list, which includes one of the states with the most Jews: New Jersey.
“Last week, we lobbied the state of New Jersey to allocate funds for a Mobile Museum of Tolerance,” Mr. Cohen said. “We are asking for funding to support the construction and development of one specifically for New Jersey.
“Typically, we look to the states for the capital expenses for building it, and then we come back to ask for funding for the operation on an annualized basis.”
Words can be effective, but an experience generally is more powerful. “It’s one thing to talk to legislators about the Mobile Museum of Tolerance, but it’s another to actually see it,” Mr. Cohen said. “That brings it to life.
“So we brought one of the mobile units to Trenton during the holiday week, when schools are closed,” Mr. Cohen said. “But the legislature was in session, so the legislators didn’t have to see pictures. They could go on the bus. We had facilitators who walked them through some of the modules, so they could get the real-time experience, and that would help them understand what we are doing.”
The state passes its budget at the end of the fiscal year, on June 30, Mr. Cohen said. “That’s when we’ll find out if we get funding.” Between now and then, the Wiesenthal team is lobbying for the aid. “We’re speaking to legislators across the state, to the governor’s office, to stakeholders, to everyone.”
The center already has funding for a different but related program. One of the modules in the Mobile Museum of Tolerance, Combat Hate, is taught inside schools around the country. “Last year, the state of New Jersey gave the Wiesenthal Center funding for our in-classroom workshops,” Mr. Cohen said. That was accomplished with the support of State Senator and Assistant Majority Leader Gordon Johnson of Englewood (D-Dist. 37), whose district includes Englewood, Englewood Cliffs, Fort Lee, Leonia, Teaneck, and Tenafly, as well as a few other, smaller towns.
These workshops are being held across the state, including the areas covered by the Jewish federations of Northern New Jersey and Greater MetroWest.
“It’s a great demonstration of the impact of meeting with educators and community stakeholders, trying to get them to see the impact of our programs,” Mr. Cohen said.
The programs have been successful in New York City. “The City Council funded them six years ago, and it’s now the largest such program that the New York City Department of Education runs,” Mr. Cohen said. “Our funding has grown from year to year, as a testament to our effectiveness, and to the Department of Education’s realization of that effectiveness.”
New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams ensured that the Wiesenthal Center’s Combat Hate program was funded. “More than 30,000 students have been through the program,” Mr. Cohen said; remember, though, that “there are 950,000 students in the system.”
When a Jewish teacher at Hillcrest High School in Queens was attacked as being pro-Israel, and forced to cower upstairs in the school as a mob of students rampaged on the first floor — there have been competing descriptions of what happened, but none of them are good — part of the response was to call in the Wiesenthal Center for its Combat Hate program. “We have programs for the students, and we also have professional development for the teachers, because often the educators aren’t sure how to respond,” Mr. Cohen said.
“In Hillcrest, working with the city’s department of education and using the funding from Adrienne Adams, within four weeks, all 2,400 students in the school, plus the 500 educators, had been in a workshop. All the workshops were the size of a class, so that means that we had between 85 and 90 individual workshops in the span of one month.
“These programs are nonpartisan and nonpolitical,” Mr. Cohen added. “It doesn’t matter where you are, in terms of what you believe. The challenges that the new generations are facing today require it.”
comments